Hereditary (2018)

Horror films have two main ways of scaring their audiences. The more conventional option is to hold the audience in suspense by what they do not see coming, scaring the audience by the surprise factor of the scare itself. This is an easy, no-risk way of building tension that many good mainstream horror films put to frequent but satisfying use.

The less-utilized method, and my favorite, is by telegraphing what is going to happen and let the audience fear come from the knowledge of the inevitable or from the danger most likely to come. This requires far more skill to execute properly, but when done so – a la Stanley Kubrick’s immortal classic The Shining – there is an ambiguity to the audience’s fear that makes the whole film creepy and unsettling because there is no indication to whether something should be feared.

Hereditary falls firmly into the latter category, and that is why it is the most disturbing horror film I have seen in quite some time. It uses almost no cheap tricks and little in the way of otherworldly presences for most of its runtime, letting the tension build organically in a suitably realistic domestic setting. It’s that last bit that makes this film more unnerving: nearly every moment feels plausible, causing this film to feel more immediate than most of its genre.

At the heart of Hereditary is a tragic family genre that we see through the eyes of Annie, portrayed by a powerful Toni Collette that shows us a character edging ever-so-closer to her breaking point. The heartbreak that is heaped upon her throughout the film is evident in her gradually-deteriorating mind, and Collette’s performance straddles the line perfectly between mind-numbing insanity and maternal care and concern. There is one scene early in the film that clues in this tension perfectly when Annie is at an emotional support group for the grieving; that scene hooked me into Annie’s inner psyche so deeply that I barely saw Collette as anyone but her character afterwards. Every character in the rest of her household is written and acted with very natural reactions to her emotional turmoil; I was especially convinced by Gabriel Byrne’s Steve, Annie’s husband, due to his subtlety that is befitting of a character like this one who attempts to be the calming, reasonable presence in chaotic events like the ones in the film.

One of the more unique aspects of Hereditary is its connection between its themes and direction. At the very start, we see a room full of dollhouse-like dioramas that we later learn are created by Annie. That first shot pans slowly across the room before zooming in and landing on one room that comes to life as Peter’s bedroom. Besides the uneasiness that the steadiness and deliberate nature of the shot create, it poses the film as an exploration into Annie’s mind, just as the dioramas themselves function. It poses the characters as pawns in a larger story that crosses generational divides, and writer-director Ari Aster has a knack for how that can be conveyed visually. The family’s house is filled with open spaces that Aster likes to almost peer into, in a similar manner to how one would observe a dollhouse. It shows how every choice we make fits into a mold of which we might not even be aware – a mold formed by those who have come before us that may or may not be steering us into the same fate as our ancestors (a fear deeply felt by Annie). It is not the first horror film to analyze the link between the present and the past realities of a family, but the way in which its direction contributes to that theme is distinct and unforgettable and puts in among the best of the genre in recent years.

My recommendation: A must-watch if you want a thrill ride.

My grade: 92/100